This House Is Not a Home

There is a place I know that feels a little too much like home. It’s a house of mine I rent from time to time, but it isn’t home. I’ve visited it so many times that I know it well.

It could easily become my home – if I let it.

But that is something I won’t do.

Each time I visit I struggle to leave; there is a familiarity that is comfortable, like a warm hug. But that hug quickly becomes a smothering embrace, threatening to dissolve me.

I go to this place kicking and screaming, fighting against it, and yet, I continue to show up.

I don’t like this part of me – the part that visits this place. But the older I get the more I realize that it’s just who I am. I am a person who lives in two separate places at any given time. I am a person who puts on a smile while I am at my home (as much as I can), but who wears no masks at my other house.

The other house is a house of darkness where no masks are needed because there is no one else there to be bothered by my countenance.

The other house is desolate, lonely, and dark. Hardly a place that a person would choose to visit. Instead, it seems to choose me. In some kind of Amityville-esque way, it haunts me and consumes me.

Thankfully I have a home – a real home – filled with those I love who wait for me. I worry that one day they will choose to close the door and leave me stranded in the echoing hallways of my other house, having grown tired of my extended, and frequent vacant-tions.

Here’s what I want them to know.

I see you trying to figure me out and help me and “fix” me. And I am grateful that I mean that much to you, but there is nothing you can do. The darkness is in me, and I am the only one who can fix the broken switch.

And I. Am. Trying. This is not a place I want to be. Know that. Above all else, know that.

Being who I am I feel too much. I think too much. I bruise too much.

Sometimes life is just too much, and I feel like I’m suffocating.

That doesn’t mean I want to die.

In fact, it’s just the opposite. I want to live. God how I want to live.

I want to be the free spirit I am. To explore and dream and create and shine.

But there are moments in my life that break me. And these are the moments that send me to my house to be still. To retreat. To repair.